Neil M. Gunn - The Silver Darlings

The author creates a rich and detailed world, with lots of important 19th century historical themes.  It touches on the economic and social anatomy of an export-led fishing boom, the aftermath of the Highland clearances, the relationship between lords and crofters, the plague, evangelicalism and religious fervor.  This was well done and never felt heavy handed with the author choosing poignant vignettes to illustrate the wider point.  

This book is a bildungsroman set in coastal, north-east Scotland during the 19th century, after the Highland clearances.  The region undergoes a fishing boom centered on herring, which are called ‘the silver darlings.’   

The protagonist is a young boy called Finn, although the story begins with his father and mother.  His father is one of the first men in their village to buy a boat and begin fishing but, very soon after, he and his crew are captured by a naval press gang while at sea and forced into naval service.  Finn’s mother, Catrine, has a dream that her husband is dead.  

She is pregnant with Finn at the time and decides to move away from ‘Dale’ to ‘Dunster’ to stay with an old woman called Kirsty and her husband.  The family grows up here, plague comes to the village, Kirsty dies and Finn’s mother, who cared for her, becomes ill but survives.  Kirsty leaves her croft and some money to Catrine and Finn and they continue to live there. 

Finn eventually becomes a fisherman in the crew of a local hero called Roddie.  Catrine and Roddie fall in love and get married and Finn comes of age, becoming the captain of his own boat and falling in love with a woman called Una.

I really enjoyed the narrative pacing and structure of the book.  To be sure, there are a fair number of exciting events that take place over the 20-30 odd years the book covers but it never felt outlandish or melodramatic.  The feeling of the plot is quotidian and realistic.  Just as exciting as the tales from the high seas are the internal, emotional storms that the characters navigate and often these are better and more clearly sketched than the physical adventures of the fishermen.   The best of these were Finn’s struggles to come to terms with his mother’s relationship with Roddie, his captain, and his attempts to understand his own emotions about Una - a popular fish gutter who has many suitors in the village.  The book’s dialogue is also generally strong, which is an achievement.

I did not like the book’s tendency towards romanticism and sentimentality.  This was most obvious in the prose, which could be florid and verbose.  In stark contrast to the dialogue, which is pithy.  There’s no economy to the writing whatsoever and huge numbers of words are used to achieve underwhelming results.  Often, so many words are thrown together haphazardly it’s quite hard to work out what the author means.  I suppose it’s supposed to be poetic but I sometimes found it unclear and prattling.  

Take this example describing waves. It begins, ‘no poem could describe them all’ but unfortunately that doesn’t stop the author from trying: ‘Take this one coming in at them now - now! - its water on the crest turned into little waters, running herding together, before - up - up! Over its shoulder and down into the long flecked hollow like a living skin.  Or that one steaming off there! - a great lump of ocean, a long-backed ridge overtopping all, a piled-up mountain.’ (p298) I found myself wondering if any of it added much or described waves meaningfully.  

Another passage, where the prose is equally purple, includes no less than 8 gerunds - ‘during the long, dark hours, an awakened ear had heard the booming, the ravening roaring winds, as if held to security by a miracle in the centre of a crashing hell.  And more than once the mind had rushed wakefulness in a vast upheaving and plunging recession, a tearing loose, with a blinded moment of dread that could feel no more as it waited the smashing obliterating impact.’ (p325) 

Sometimes sentences can run to 100-odd words and 16 commas (p368/69), which is too long for me especially when coupled with flashy prose.  Sometimes it’s just too romantic: ‘her shoulders and head uprose like an obstruction, a smooth rock, in the river of time running round and past her.  It was shape in the void, it was constancy in the flux, it was beauty’s still flower in eternity.’ (p370)   The author never seems afraid to use three descriptions where one would suffice!  

This tendency towards overly-elaborate and ‘poetic’ prose, perhaps understandably, is at its worst discussing romance.  ‘He let the dark girl - brown in her darkness, a mouse brightness - fade from his mind, pass away into the outer ring of eternal beauty and eternal sorrow, the dark outer ring of the song, where it is lonely to wander’ (p400). I thought it was high falutin and ineffective.  It is coupled with a weird sort of prudishness when it comes to sexual matters.  Where other matters can be described in candid terms, if the author isn’t gripped by the desire to be poetic, sex is always dealt with in breathless witterings.  It’s all, ‘crash through the barrier of strange reluctance’ and ‘find peace for herself and her body inside the circle of his strength’ (p230).  Given Roddie’s violent outburst in a bar in Stornaway, I’m not sure getting fucked by him would be such a peaceful experience!  Catrine, an otherwise highly pragmatic and strong woman, seems to turn into a giddy schoolgirl, rather than a middle-aged mother of an adult child, when she eventually gets it on with Roddie. ‘“Roddie, no!” she said, feeling the dark force of his body coming at her, pleading wildly out of the weakness that was melting her flesh.’ (p478)  The appearance of sex is always the prompt for ugly and circuitous prose!

There is also a very annoying amount of repetition, which really starts to grate after 600 odd pages.  Everytime a fisherman swears to God at sea he must touch cold iron. This made an appearance every 20 pages or so whenever anyone is in a boat - which is a fair amount!  One of Roddie’s crew called Henry is never mentioned without the word ‘satiric’ being used.  Finn’s biggest adventure, an ill fated trip to Stornoway in foul weather with Roddie, is related at great length and is then more or less repeated when Finn recounts the story back on dry land.  

It now feels like I’ve written a lot more about how I disliked the prose than I’ve written about how much I enjoyed the setting, feel and plot of the story, which were all really good.  Even though the prose really pissed me off at points and the book has an unmistakable leaning towards sentimentalism, ultimately, there’s a lot more to enjoy than there is to feel upset about.  It’s a good book and I would definitely recommend it.

Saki (H.H.Munro) - The Best of Saki (Picador)

There’s a lot to like about Saki’s extremely short stories.  They juxtapose buttoned up, conventional Edwardian upper-middle class society with unexpected savagery and brutality.  Amusing hi-jinx and practical jokes abound with varying degrees of success but I think most people would find something at least mildly enjoyable in this collection.

Saki creates credible scenes and characters with incredible economy and was obviously a shrewd and critical observer of the society around him.  Tyrannical aunts, busy-body society housewives and put-upon children are all sketched with ease and elan.

After a while, the stories become a bit formulaic.  A lovely, posh, jolly hockey sticks sort of weekend house party, or situation, is disrupted by a reminder of the savage side of life.  Very often, this is an actual animal.  The more ferocious or exotic the better.   The prim and proper veneer of social convention disappears and chaos duly ensues.  Usually, everything is alright in the end and it transpires that a child has got one over on the adults or that a witty man-child like Clovis has played a hilarious practical joke on the stuffy elders.  It's true that not all the stories have a happy ending and some finish with people dead or dying.  However, orders are inverted and conventions overthrown with such regularity that the impact becomes somewhat diminished.

By the end of the book, in spite of the fact that I was bored and found the stories a bit repetitive, it’s undeniable that the best ones were enjoyable and pleasing.  My favorites were ‘The Stake’, about a young gambler who loses access to ready funds and secretly gambles away the family’s cherished cook, and ‘Fate’ about a billiards player who invents a crisis to avoid finishing a game he is about to lose.  All told, I wasn’t a huge fan of Saki.  I really liked a couple of stories but, in the end, his prose style is a bit prim and proper and even though he is sending up the society he lives in, I feel like he does so in a way that’s a bit twee and formulaic.

Marcus Threscothick - Coming Back To Me

This was an interesting book about the psychological difficulties of a cricket obsessive.  Everything about his upbringing is focused on cricket, with his Dad playing a major part in the local club side and his Mum making the teas.  The pinnacle of happiness for him appears to be making a lot of runs and winning a cricket match, followed by beers with the lads down the club.  Teenage seasons are remembered minutely and anything to do with cricket appears to have been recorded in near photographic detail.  The consequences of this incredible focus have clearly been impressive on a professional level.  However, on a personal level, it at least seems possible that it made life problematic.  The first inkling of this comes when we learn about how he met his wife.  While Trescothick might spend several pages, or even a whole chapter, discussing a match or individual innings, meeting the love of his life is recorded in less than half a page.  At this relatively early stage in the book, I thought perhaps he might be reticent about discussing his private life when it had been under such scrutiny in the past.  

However, as the book progressed I formed an image of Trescothick as someone who isn’t much interested in life outside of cricket.  We learn about how he is unwilling to return home from tour in Pakistan after his father-in-law is seriously injured, leaving his wife distressed.  To his credit, this is recognised as a shocking error of judgment with hindsight and he takes full responsibility for his mistake.  In his defence, as vice-captain standing in for the absent Micheal Vaughan, he may have felt a heightened sense of responsibility.  Nonetheless, the incident could be viewed as evidence of a dangerous cricket myopia.  

This total obsession with cricket seems to have been a mixed blessing for Trescothick.  He gets so good that he plays internationally, which means he is touring for extended periods throughout the year. This is a lifestyle that he doesn’t seem constitutionally suited to, with some of his earliest and most traumatic childhood memories related to being separated from home and family life.  Nonetheless, the excitement and desire to play cricket gets him through the endless hours of traveling and being bored in hotel rooms.  Until they don’t.  

Trescothick talking about his mental problems is undoubtedly the highlight of the book.  He has a breakdown while on tour and needs to return home, but wants to keep it hushed up.  Owing to the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his departure, the press becomes very interested in what’s going on.  The most distressing part of the book is when he returns to the UK.  Given that his psychological issues relate to separation from home and family, it seems sensible that he would go straight home.  However, this isn’t possible because of all the paparazzi at his house, so he has to go into hiding in Devon.  It really rams home to me how being a sportsman in the public eye effectively robs you of a private life.  In fairness, Trescothick and his advisors are themselves somewhat to blame for the situation, for not being more forthcoming about the circumstances of his departure from the tour.  

It seems like Trescothick, as a man who really just wants to play cricket and eat sausages, is deeply confused and worried about what’s happening to him.  He doesn’t want to talk about his problems because they might threaten his international cricket career.  He continually hopes that they’ll be a short term problem and go away with the right therapy or medication.  It’s hard to blame him for this kind of wishful thinking.  In the end, as media speculation reaches fever pitch about the reasons for his absence (including rumours that Vaughan is sleeping with his wife - which he flat out denies), his advisors set up a friendly interview with Sky Sports with pre-planned questions and answers so he can reveal his mental struggles and end all the speculation.  Trescothick botches this and doesn’t say his lines about his psychological issues, rendering the whole thing a waste of time.  I feel this shows just how scared and ashamed Trecothick was of what had happened to him.  

Perhaps because of this horrendous experience, Trescothick is very open about what happened to him in the book.  A cricket dressing room, the place Trescothick lived his entire adult life, is probably not the most understanding environment to talk about difficult psychological issues.  His nickname amongst his teammates after his breakdown is ‘Madfish’.  So it’s clear to me how much he’s had to overcome to get to the point of writing a book about the experience.  One of the most positive aspects of the book was the fact that Trecothick makes many mistakes, admits that he’s made them, learns from them and improves afterwards.

There is some evidence that his cricket career followed some similar stages.  Early in his professional career, he has issues leaving the ball outside off-stump, which Peter Carlstein helps him solve in Australia.  He also has some issues facing spin, which he solves by ‘pressing’ a half step forward at Duncan Fletcher’s request - ‘Duncan’s theory was that, when batting against spinners, if you made a small but positive move onto the front foot before the ball was released, you would put yourself in a better position to go either fully forward or fully back depending on the length of the ball…”if you are going to catch a bus, it is better to arrive at the bus stop early enough to read the the number on the front, rather than at the last moment when you have no choice but to get on and find out later if it is going where you want to go.”’ (p81-82)

Of course, no sporting autobiography would be complete without the obligatory score settling!  Trescothick gets going early by putting a certain Nick Speak (Lancashire batsman) to the sword for saying, ‘this bloke is shit’ (p36) to him as a 17 year old debutant.  Trescothick classifies this as bullying rather than sledging.   Former England captain Nasser Hussain gets a very tepid review.  Trescothick claims he never said anything to him before his England debut until they were in the middle together.  He also tells an unflattering story about him smashing a fridge window in the changing room after he was given out to bad decision.  The most serious allegations are that he put his own batting interests above those of the team during a ODI (p110) and that he was a self-interested captain (p122) - perhaps Trecothick has something of a vendetta against him?  Shane Warne is also slated for writing an article saying he should be dropped from the England team (p143-144).

Alongside these attacks, explicit or veiled, are some more enjoyable titbits.  For instance,  apparently Caddick and Gough used to bicker constantly in the England dressing room.  I also learned that Nathan Astle once went from 101 to 200 runs in 39 deliveries in a test vs England in March, 2002 (p105).  Overall, Astle’s double hundred took 153 balls.  Perhaps most enjoyably we learn that Trescothick is a big Eminem fan and says he was rapping ‘Lose Yourself’ during his test double ton vs SA.  He also gives shout outs to Snoop Dogg and Warren G!

 If Trescothick had never had any of his problems I imagine this would have been a boring read.  Owing to everything that’s happened to him, and the fact he suffered from not being open about it, he’s remarkably candid about his struggles and the mistakes he made trying to manage them.  I also couldn’t help but feel like the professionalization of cricket and the structure of the international game were partially responsible for his issues.  Of course, you could respond, ‘well, he shouldn’t have played then’ but that was never really an option for an obsessive like him.  In my mind, Trescothick’s life might have been a lot more simple and straightforward if he had less talent and was a club cricketer like his Dad without any of the stress that comes with playing for money in the media spotlight.  Whether it was all worth it in the end is anyone’s guess.

Ben Lerner - Leaving Atocha Station

An American poet has received a prestigious scholarship to Madrid for a year.  The book’s opening finds him there, studiously avoiding any contact with the university department he’s supposedly connected to and, instead, smoking lots of hash on the roof of his apartment and going to The Prada to look at a picture for half an hour everyday.  So far so good!  After this daily ritual he writes poetry by copying out bits from Lorca and interpolating them with his own associations.  I really enjoyed his honesty about his professional life and his truthfulness about whether any of it was meaningful.

I became less enamored with the stoner-poet lifestyle when I discovered the poet is also taking unidentified anti-anxiety drugs and suffers from panic attacks.  Smoking a lot of weed seems an odd choice in this context.  He also chooses to multiply his anti-anxiety dose after some negative event or other, to the extent he appears to be losing touch with reality.  I was left with the image of a talented poet, behaving strangely and perhaps unraveling around the edges for unexplained reasons.

The story begins to draw in more characters when the poet makes some friends in Madrid, most prominently a young, fashionable gallery owner and his sister who move in artistic circles and like his poetry.  Or the status his poetry scholarship confers on him.  The poet tells outrageous lies in order to get attention or try to sleep with people –  this was probably my favourite part of the book.  He tells the gallery owner’s sister, who he is perpetually trying to sleep with, that his Mum is dead.  Later, he confesses it is a lie but replaces it with another one about his Dad being a tyrannical fascist.  I loved the way these shady acts are reported without any self-sympathy or attempt to justify his shittiness!  It was also amusing to read in places.

Apart from the central pillar of the Atocha terrorist attacks, the narrative is quotidian and enjoyable.  Visiting the relatives of Spanish friends, going to gallery events, house parties, the odd university conference or symposium and visits to other cities.

The prose was pithy and enjoyable but, perhaps inevitably, given to flights of poetic fancy where the texture of forgiveness or the heart rate of sanctimony are referenced.  Even though I couldn’t find much to enjoy in the less prosaic passages, I was very taken by the fact that the author gives credit to other people’s ideas and phrases in his footnotes.  It seemed like a manifestation of the same instinct towards honesty I found in other parts of the book.  An instinct that is almost entirely contradicted by his reported behaviour during the story!

I thought it was a strange decision to put really small photographs in a paperback edition where the quality would always be poor.  Even to someone who knows Madrid well, in heavily pixelated black and white printed on uncoated paper, the pictures add nothing.  

Towards the end of the book, the poet calls his parents and confesses to lying about them.  He also confesses to his friend, the gallery owner’s sister, who variously performs the role of his tour guide, lover and patron.  She more or less tells him it’s OK for him to lie because he’s a poet.  As someone who doesn't like poetry much, I wasn’t so sure!  But I enjoyed the story as an interesting and entertaining glimpse into the life of a poet.   

Elif Batuman - The Idiot

I loved the prose in this book and found it to be, in some ways, one of the most honest renderings of the feelings of attending an elite university I’ve ever read. I felt the book took a turn for the worse when the focus shifted to Selin’s relationship with Ivan. Once Selin is in Hungary and her wonderfully depicted college life ceases it’s essentially just a repetitive, cack-handed and really frustrating love story that goes absolutely nowhere. I ended the book unreasonably upset that so much energy had been expended by all concerned (Selin, Ivan, Batuman as the writer, me as the reader) to no discernable end.


The title of this book immediately made me think of Dostoevsky and that the author must be pretty cocky to invite comparison with it. After reading it, I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s novel about a man who embodies Christian love and the response he evokes in nineteenth century Russian society. Probably the title refers to the protagonist, a naive freshman at Harvard who doesn’t really know anything.


This character is a success as she seems intellectual, clueless, funny and confused in roughly the correct quantities for a Harvard fresher who’s led a sheltered life with her single mother. Her experience of university life is also very well drawn. It mainly consists of going to classes that seem to have little, if any, practical application or purpose, eating in the cafeteria and hanging out with the one family friend she knows who’s also at Harvard. The feel of all this is a weird sort of stressful suspended animation. All the hard work of applying to, and getting into, an Ivy league school has been done. There’s still a reasonable academic workload but also lots of free time. Very few people have that many close friends but everyone has been convinced that this experience is, variously, everything they have been working for up to this point / the best days of their life / the time when they’ll make their friends forever / the beginning of an amazing career of professional success and personal achievement. The fact that, for many people, the Ivy league experience is none of these things is well depicted.


Less successful is the relationship between Selin and Ivan. It all starts out quirkily and innocently enough with some weird flirting over email, when it has just been invented in the 1990s. The levels of social dyslexia and fumbling that follow quickly become intolerably frustrating. It’s true that the prose is always good and can be laugh-out-loud funny, which is rare for me. It’s also true that a lot of the feelings Selin experiences are relatable. However, the sheer monotony of their botched attempts to express their feelings was my lasting impression of the book. Perhaps the turning point is Selin’s trip to Hungary, Ivan’s homeland. Choosing to spend a vacation volunteering in a friend from university’s home country must be as clear an indication of interest as any man has ever received short of a physical assault. For the character of Selin, who is fresher than the sea breeze in terms of any kind of experience, sexual or otherwise, it’s probably the most salacious advance she’s capable of. Ivan, who is older and allegedly has a girlfriend, has absolutely no excuse for his pathetic behaviour. The story drones on through various fumbled emails, phone calls, physical meetings, meals, trips and stays at Ivan’s parent’s house and still absolutely nothing romantic happens at all! ‘What on earth is going on here?’ I found myself asking, but it wasn’t even that the narrative stretched credulity, it was just so boring! Kiss! Fuck! Hold hands! Anything! In the end, there is some sorry excuse for an explanation of the whole debacle, but by that stage I felt like the damage had been done. I don’t even remember the half-baked justifications Ivan and Selin offer each other for their abject failure but I do remember being highly dissatisfied with the book’s ending. My feelings of vexation were probably exacerbated by the fact that Svetlana, a highly amusing college friend of Selin, is in Paris while Selin goes to Hungary and so is cut from the show. I missed her more and more as the Hungarian misadventure dragged on and on.


Someone mentioned to me that they found Batuman’s depiction of Hungarians to be condescending. I also noticed that the book contains the idea that Hungarian people are of Turkic origin, which is apparently controversial for some. It’s true that the Hungarian characters are not very flattering, but nor are the Turkish ones. I also have the feeling that the English classes that Selin gives were more amusing in America than in Hungary but maybe that’s to do with the context of the general deterioration. So, although I doubt the point of the novel was to make an ethnological point, it did spend a lot of time showing how the languages were similar. I suppose it’s justifiable because Selin speaks Turkish and is learning Hungarian, but it was obscure.


If I were the editor I would have suggested an expansion of the Harvard material and a drastic contraction of the Hungary scenes! The early parts of the book did sort of make me want to read the sequel (‘Either / Or’ released May 2022). Surely, as a sophomore, Selin will get it on with someone, hopefully not Ivan, or at least kiss them?! The risk is that it’s just another few hundred pages of tedious, adolescent muddling is currently providing enough of a counter-incentive.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Gambler

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf and ‘to read’ list for too long.  So, after a few factual tomes, I thought this would be a change of length and pace.  

The book’s basic structure is as follows:  The narrator, Alexei, is the tutor to a rich Russian family’s children, living in a hotel suite abroad in Roulettenburg - a fictitious spa town in Germany.  Alexei is in love with Polina, who is the General’s step-daughter.  She needs money and asks Alexei to gamble for her at the casino, which he does reluctantly.  He wins and gives her the money but she won’t tell him what it's for.  Alexei later learns from another of Polina’s suitors staying at the resort, the Englishman Mr. Astley, that the family has no money.  The General has squandered the family fortune and, furthermore, has taken out many loans against his expected inheritance.  As such he desperately needs his aunt (The Grandmother) to die so he can inherit her estate.  

Alexei professes his love to Polina and promises he will do anything for her.  This prompts her to challenge Alexei to be rude to a baron and baroness of high social standing who are staying in the resort as well.  This leads the General to fire him as the family tutor but he continues to stay at the hotel.  

During this time, the Grandmother is still in Russia.  The family, their suitors and their creditors in Germany are all eagerly awaiting news regarding her ill health and the possibility of her imminent death.   The unctuous French pairing of Des Grieux and Mdme. Blanche both hang around in the hope that she will die, Des Grieux because he has loaned the General money and he wants to be paid back and Mdme. Blanche because she will only marry the General if he has money.  The General sends a telegram every day to Russia enquiring, it’s implied not very subtly, about his aunt’s health.  However, instead of the anticipated news of her death turning up in Roulettenburg, she does instead!  

‘Grandma’ is very grand and dismissive, is presumed to be fabulously wealthy and is treated in style by the hotel’s management.  She mocks the General’s covetousness and tells him to forget about getting any of her money.  She demands to go gambling and says she will only do so with Alexei.  She is initially successful and wins a considerable amount of money. Alexei helps her to begin with but then urges her to stop and refuses to gamble with her anymore as he sees her behaviour become more erratic.  This leaves her at the mercy of some avaricious Poles, who bamboozle her and steal her money.  She gets hopelessly addicted to gambling and loses 10x the sizable amount she had won over the next couple of days.  After these heavy losses, she returns to Russia by train.  

Alexei finds out from Polina that Des Grieux is selling the properties the General mortgaged to him because Grandma is not dead.  However, Des Grieux is going to give the General 50k back for Polina’s benefit.  She says she wishes she had 50k to throw back in his face. She reveals she has been Des Grieux’s mistress but that he won’t marry her now.   Inspired by this thought Alexei rushes to the roulette tables and furiously gambles everything he has in the world.  He goes on a winning streak and becomes a rich man.  He brings the money back to Polina who accuses him of trying to buy her like DG but then seems happy and spends the night in his room, which is thought to be scandalous.  In the morning she asks for 25k and then flings it in Alexei’s face before running off to Mr Astley’s hotel to be with him.  He then leaves for Paris with Mdme. Blanche and lets her spend all his money before the General turns up and marries her.  She still wants a husband with a grand title but doesn’t care if he’s rich anymore because she is already.  Alexei leaves and travels around gambling resorts unemployed trying to make a living or get rich again.  He learns from Mr. Astley that Polina is in Switzerland and is still in love with him.  He resolves to go and find her but eventually stays on to gamble more because he has premonitions of a big win.

There was a lot to enjoy in the book.  The gamblings scenes were a highlight, especially the Grandmother’s headlong charge and Alexei’s big win.  Dostoevsky captures the frenzied unrest of the throng at the tables superbly and accurately depicts the febrile energy, illusions of control, desperation, hope, fury, frustration and dazed exhaustion gambling can produce.  He also produces some reasons why Russians are particularly susceptible to gambling, via Alexei, with his usual Slavic exceptionalism!

The characters of the General and the Grandmother immediately spring vividly to mind and were particular favourites.  The former foppish and pathetic, the latter capricious, formidable and ferocious.  I liked the predatory pairing of the Little Frenchman (des Grieux) and the General’s fiance (Mdme. Blanche) very much.  They play the parts of the civilised guest and fiance in front of the General but I imagine them scheming furiously about their financial futures during their clandestine chats.  The narrative was mainly good too, especially the Grandmother's sudden, unexpected appearance at the resort.  

However, some parts of the novel were a bit overblown.  For example,  Alexei’s infatuation with Polina, where he offers to throw himself off a cliff to prove his love for her and encourages her to dare him to do anything to the same end.  Could the story have done without the Polina love story?  In its favour, it helps the narrative along by providing the reason for Alexei’s dismissal as the family tutor.  It gives Alexei a love interest, which ultimately shows just how deeply he has fallen into his gambling addiction.  It also gives a reason for Alexei to start gambling, although he could just as well have started when the Grandmother arrived.  Alexei’s love for Polina shows him to be obsessive and ultimately gives a good measure of how deeply addicted to gambling he has become by the end of the book.  

Against this, Polina’s situation can be a bit confusing.  She is in love with Alexei, the mistress of des Grieux and being courted by Mr. Astley.  The affair with des Grieux could be thought implausible given his hold over Polina’s step-father but does allow Alexei to indulge in some hilarious digressions on why Russian women are most susceptible to the charms of Frenchmen!  Polina is whimsical in the extreme, vain and barely seems to know what she’s doing most of the time.  She is living in a highly stressful situation, which could explain some of her erratic behaviour.  Eventually, Mr. Astley takes her to Switzerland for her health, which could be interpreted as a nervous breakdown.  Ultimately, it’s hard to separate out Polina’s love stories from the narrative but my sense is that it wasn’t strictly necessary for them to occupy such a central position.  I did like the way Alexei’s passion for Polina ignites his passion for gambling, which it eventually consumed along with everything else.  

The part where Alexei goes with Mdme. Blanche to Paris and allows her to spend all his winnings is a little stretched.  It does demonstrate, in a slightly forced way, how little Alexei cares for the actual objective of gambling - money.  Maybe he is still lovesick over Polina but this plot twist struck me as bordering on farce and maybe it’s supposed to be.

The book’s denouement, where Alexei learns that Polina does love him and is in Switzerland only to have a premonition about a huge gambling win and stay in Hamburg to play roulette, is poignant.  It seems like his love of Polina has been replaced by a love of gambling.

This book has an interesting background and is laced with significance and redolence of Dostoevsky’s own life.  For example, during his first marriage, Doestoevksy also had a mistress called Polina (Suslova) whom he met in Paris in 1862.  She was 20 years his junior and the affair ended when she left him for another man in 1863.  He may have begun to gamble heavily after this, or after the death of  his first wife in 1864.

Dostoevsky himself was a gambling addict for several years as amply demonstrated by these letters to his second wife:

‘I was so confident of a small win. At first I lost a little, but as soon as I began to lose, I wanted to win it back. I lost still more, then I was compelled to continue playing, at least to regain the money necessary for my departure – and I lost everything Anya, I will not implore you to take pity on me, better be dispassionate, but I am terribly afraid of your judgement’

May 1867

Things aren’t much better six months later:

‘Anya, my dear, my precious, I have lost everything, everything, everything! Oh! My angel, don’t be sad, don’t worry. Be confident, a time will come when I shall be worthy of you and I shall stop robbing you like a wretched low thief!’ Nov 1867

However, after having to leave Russia in 1867 to avoid creditors, Doestoevsky eventually returned to Russia in 1871 and managed to give up gambling around the same time.

Another interesting facet of the book’s history relating to gambling is that Dostoevsky seems to have written the book for a bet with a publisher (F.T.Stellovsky), to whom he owed money.  This was in 1865, the same year he wrote ‘Crime and Punishment’ . Dostoevsky bet the rights to ‘The Gambler’ itself and all his future works for 10 years if he couldn’t produce a novel in 30 days.  In order to win his bet, Dostoevsky hired a stenographer for the first time in his career.  She was Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, a woman 25 years his junior, who would later become his wife and an essential contributor to his work.The publisher tried to make himself unavailable to receive the book at the time of the deadline. However, at Anna’s suggestion, Dostoevsky took the manuscript to the police station and had it registered there with the time and date.  

This was a great book with memorable characters and vivid scenes of gambling written by someone who experienced the power of its vagaries first hand.

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

This was a beautiful little book with a quintessentially Edinburgh feel to it.  Set around the 1930s, most of the narrative takes place at a school for girls.  A group of six are selected by Miss Brodie, a teacher in her prime, to be the creme de la creme of their age group - The Brodie Set.  There are periodic flashes forward to the student’s and teacher’s later lives so the fate of the characters are known.  The book has some narrative anticipation but its charms are not about finding out what happens next.  The joy of the book was more in the ingenious details and effortless touches Spark uses to construct such a vivid world.  The aphorisms of Miss Brodie, the brief but deep characterisations of the members of the set and the sketch of the art master’s home life and marital infidelities.  The prose is also excellent and never clunky.

A group of school friends is a familiar setting and a good way to establish individual identities within a larger collective one.  The Brodie Set is an extreme example of this tendency towards cliques but it’s believable and feels authentic.  The level of pupil-teacher interaction is also unlikely today but could be credible in the 30s.  Miss Brodie instructs the girls in a wide range of subjects outwith the conventional school curriculum with a heavy focus on her own history, travels and life.  With the exception of Sandy,  who’s Miss Brodie’s special confidante and whose character is fleshed in more detail, the characterisation of the other members is largely limited to their future fates or descriptions of what they’re known for as schoolgirls.  Jenny is known for her beauty, Rose is ‘famous for sex’, Eunice is famous for gymnastics and swimming, Monica is known for her mathematical abilities and her temper and Mary is famous for being the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong.  The details are scant but are oft repeated and so well chosen that the overall effect is very successful.

The star of the show is Miss Jean Brodie.  She chooses to dedicate her prime to educating her set in what she deems the original sense of the Latin verb ‘educere’ - to lead out.  This is exactly the kind of maxim that makes Miss Brodie so believable and engaging as a character.  The leading out takes the form of stories about her love life, trips to the theatre and art galleries, studies of the classics and lectures on the benefits of facism.  It all feels perfect for a middle class Edinburgh school teacher.  She carries a self confident feeling of always being in the right and the primary school teacher’s penchant for unequivocal statements.  Nonetheless, there’s also a slightly deranged, even desperate undercurrent to her character that’s never encountered directly.  Instead, it’s hinted at throughout the novel.  Who could disagree with her lofty aims of leading the girls out into adulthood through the means of a practical and well-rounded education?  But in practice, her obsession with Italian facism and the love lives of some of the set seem misguided and inappropriate.  

It’s the same when it comes to her own love life.  She eschews love in favour of her project of educating the girls, which immediately made me wonder what happened to her in the past.  Nonetheless, she falls in love with the art master, who loves her back, but won’t pursue it because he is married.  Instead, she conceives a highly questionable plan that Rose, the most beautiful of the set, should have an affair with him instead.  The singing master is also in love with her and she starts to sleep with him after she has abandoned her romance with the art master.  It’s a rather half-hearted affair on Miss Brodie’s part, with more emphasis on fattening him up than on romantic development, and he eventually marries another teacher.  I felt like there was some unmentioned personal tragedy that perpetually loomed over Miss Brodie.

As a reader, we never enter the inner world of Miss Brodie.  On the outside, she appears steadfast and resolute in her beliefs and actions but their very nature made me wonder where they came from.  In a sense, readers encounter Miss Brodie as her pupils would have.  We see the face that Miss Brodie wants to show to the world but never the true motivations behind the mask or the inner monologue that produces and sustains it.  She makes a big show of the dedication of her prime to the education of her set, but what is her personal stake in this?  The events of the story show it can’t simply be an altruistic love of education.  As Sandy comments after betraying Miss Brodie, in a strikingly similar fashion to the pronouncements of the lady herself,  ‘it’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due’.  Contrary to Miss Brodie’s overtly stated loyalty to the education of the girls, is she really using them and abusing the position of power she holds over them at an impressionable age?  There’s a fevered quality about her dedication to the set, her love of facism and her unusual approach to romance that makes it seem like a retaliation against something horrible in her past, which readers never learn anything about.  

The betrayal of Miss Brodie by Sandy, who she never suspects, is another excellent facet of the plot.  The headmistress, Miss McKay, is suspicious of Miss Brodie’s methods and periodically tries to infiltrate the set to gather intelligence to use against her.  Initially I felt like Sandy’s betrayal was an unnecessarily harsh treatment of a pitiable and well intentioned middle aged woman.  However, without knowing the true reasons for Miss Brodie’s condition and way of life, it became more and more ambiguous, especially when considered in the light of her more hare-brained schemes.  Do Sandy and the rest of the set actually have legitimate grievances for their treatment by Miss Brodie?

For a book of less than 200 pages, it contained so much.  The evocative, yet lightly sketched, characters.  The initial love triangle between the teachers and then the planned, and actual, affairs of members of the set with Mr Lloyd.  The headmistress’s scheming against Miss Brodie and her ultimate betrayal by Sandy.  Above all, it was a fascinating character study of Miss Brodie herself examined through the lens of the six set members.  It was thoroughly enjoyable and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it, especially to any Edinburgh natives!